Baking in China 101

Major disappointment after arriving in China…no full size ovens. Yup, apparently, the Chinese do not bake.

Luckily, we were able to get a little baby toaster oven that is great for sandwiches, individual slices of pizza, MAYBE 6 cookies, and I don’t know, the tiniest cake ever! You’d be lucky to find a half-dozen muffin tin to fit the thing. Luckily, I have come across the silicone cupcake molds, and smaller cake molds, but nothing like I am used to. My cake blog is Wallflourcakes if you want to see what I am used to using an oven for. Anyways, my first baking attempt while being in China was lemon cupcakes. I visited a few different shops to finds ingredients that looked familiar and then set off on my seemingly impossible quest. Unfortunately, I forgot that our baby oven is in Celsius temperature rather than Fahrenheit, and they baked incredibly fast, thus burning the bottoms and creating a super dense cake. The taste was spot on though! It just so happens that I forgot to take pictures of that attempt, haha. I did, however, capture my 2nd baking attempt which went rather well! Chocolate chip cookies!

It is a pretty simple and easy recipe! After creaming the sugars and butter, (by hand, missing my ole’ pistachio kitchen aid at that point) I added the egg and blended well. Then added the sifted flour, salt and baking soda until it was combined. Morsels are last, and most important! Typically, I would add so much more than a cup to this recipe, but I’ve really got to use those babies wisely, so depressingly expensive!

Let the dough refrigerate for 1-2 hours, then roll into balls and place on ungreased cookie sheet, 175C for about 8 mins. They were PERFECT! I’m not sure if I was just really missing some home baked goods or what, but they were irresistible. Even Chris raved about them, and he isn’t crazy about sweets.

Mmmmm! Whole recipe made about 14 cookies.

I hope to make the time to experiment with baking as much as I can. Because it is so much more challenging here, I will appreciate the end product so much more. Can’t wait to make more goodies!

In September 2014, newly named Mr. & Mrs. Bump, we moved to Shanghai, China. Having more work than play, this journal has become an outline of our lives here, rather than a travel blog. Though we hope to do loads of traveling soon! Hope you enjoy seeing Shanghai though our eyes :)